Modern consumers of media content have access to a plethora of media from a variety of sources. For example, the same movie or episode of a television show may be available from a television network through on-demand, live feeds, or recorded by a user using a digital video recorder (DVR). Furthermore, the same media content may be available from numerous third-party services. Each of these sources may insert commercials or other additional content at different times and for different durations. Thus, two users who are both at a playback point often minutes from when a media asset began from different sources may not be at the same point in the action in the media asset. To alleviate the problem where two sources were not synchronized at the same time point, some conventional systems attempted to align the action in the media assets based on closed caption text. However, not all media assets include closed caption text, and furthermore the closed caption text may be initially displayed by different sources at different times and for different durations, leading to less accurate synchronization of a media asset from two sources.
Additionally, when resynchronizing a media asset from two sources, some conventional systems would accelerate or decelerate playback from one source until the media asset was synchronized with another source. However, if the sources were out of synchronization by a large duration of time, some users may find this approach distracting.